Flickr and Media Center

I wanted to harness Media Center's ability to display photos, but don't actually store anything locally; a while back I made a call to use Flickr for my photo storage, thus ensuring that I had an off-site backup of all my photos.

This was something of a problem. Flickr don't actually give you an easy way of downloading all your images, but this is what I wanted to do to use them with Media Center. Ashleigh had suggested using Little Syncr, but that app doesn't actually download any images from Flickr in the first instance, but rather syncs everything up moving forward.

Enter FlickrDown. This little app has handily downloaded all of my Flickr images to my local machine, and I can now display them using Media Center. I'll have a play with Little Syncr later to see if that's a good bet for future Flickr activity :) 

Media Center problems

I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. My first night of properly using the Media PC, and I've hit a bit of a snag.

I set Wanted to "record series", and I noticed that the first episode was complaining that there wouldn't be enough space to record it. There quite clearly is - there's 100gb of space on the disk. While trying to investigate further, EShell (which is basically Media Center) crashed. "Fair enough", I thought, "these things happen. I'll try again".

I then set Supernatural to "record series". The same thing happened, and EShell crashed. I restarted Media Center again, and whilst navigating around the scheduled recordings page, EShell crashes. This happened fairly consistently. During all this I was recording the first episode of The Apprentice, and credit to Media Center, it has managed to record the whole program, with (by the looks of it) minimal hiccups.

I've also checked the event log, and there are large numbers of "Failure opening database connection" and "Exception opening connection to database" errors. An hours worth, in fact. Funnily enough, exactly the same amount of time that The Apprentice was recording for.

Back in a moment…

…Now that The Apprentice has finished recording, it appears that everything is working fine…how strange…

I will be keeping an eye on this one.

Don’t fear Sky?

I'm not afraid of Sky, I just really don't like them very much.

Ashleigh brought to my attention an article on The Register called Don't be scared of Sky. It's an interesting read, and contains these gems:

"Churn (cancellation) levels are higher than ever, and the cynical majority in the industry reportedly believe the new portfolio of services is a cunning ruse to improve its subscriber statistics as it seems to have reached a difficult commercial plateau in customer acquisition. When you phone Sky to announce your intention to leave, the company's desperate customer support staff will do virtually anything to keep you (word to the wise: if you want a few months subscription free, or to bump up your package, call them up and tell them you're getting Freeview or NTL instead). The UK isn't quite the same dynamic as the US, with its hundreds of millions of households. The reasons for the slow down are simple - it costs too much, the content is getting worse by the day, and you can get better elsewhere."

"What do I want to watch? Probably less than 10 per cent of what Sky's dismal, failing waste of a platform has to offer."

It would appear that I'm really not the only one getting rid of Sky, as I suspected (and hoped, to be honest). I've heard tales of digital aerial installers being busier than ever as more and more people decide that chucking £45 away on a raft of channels you're never going to watch is pretty dumb. The one thing Sky have got that makes their position particularly potent at the present time is Sky+; It's just so damned convenient. "Punters" love it. It's really, really easy to use (even my 9 month old son has inadvertently recorded TV programs before), and you don't even need video cassettes!!!

Media Center: Moving forward

So the aerial install is done and my Media PC has existed quite nicely for the last week, recording random crap whenever I asked it to. I had one tense moment when the machine rebooted itself overnight, but a quick check of the event log showed that this was "intended functionality" - thanks Windows Update! (Which makes me wonder, if I've got something scheduled to record at 3am, and Windows decides to reboot, will it? Or will it wait?)

I bought a nice, capacious 300gb Seagate drive, and have transferred the contents of my 120gb IDE drive across (currently my Dell has a 160gb SATA and 120gb IDE drive in it) with the intention of harvesting the IDE drive for my Media PC. While 120gb isn't ideal (a recording of Freebie and the Bean the other night takes up 4.2gb) it'll do. If all else fails, I'll stick a USB2.0 card in the Media PC and hang an external drive off the back. My newly installed piece of Ethernet cable lets me do two things: copy content from the Media PC to the Dell in less than a day, and frees up the slot my wireless card was in for the aforementioned USB2.0 card.

I've also taken the opportunity to back my iTunes music folder off onto another drive (a 120gb drive I've got in a USB2 caddy) which will now be placed in a drawer and never used again.

So what's next? Stick the 120gb drive in the Media PC, move it back downstairs, and show the wife how to use it, that's what. I need to start using this thing to replace my SKY+ box now that the aerial work is done. I may well pick up another card for the Dell too.

Oh, and if anyone knows of a decent tool to convert dvr-ms files into something more agreeable, let me know

It’s alive! (nearly)

My Media Center PC continues to move slowly towards full capacity.

I'm still not quite there though. Last night I did some more fiddling. I've found that setting the s-video output on my newly installed Nvidia card to NTSC actually produces a better picture than using PAL. I've also found that using the MCE Config Reset tool I discovered online has put the "toolbars" back to where they should be. Divx video works brilliantly too, producing a perfectly watchable picture on my Sony Wega TV.

The only problem I have now is that the Sweetspot TV card doesn't pick up digital television terribly well through my aerial. In actual fact, I've noticed that certain channels on the Wega's IDTV aren't quite right, with distortion and flickering being quite visible. My conclusion: I need to fit a new aerial. Hopefully once that's done, the Sweetspot and IDTV will function correctly, and I can start to record some programs on the Media PC.
But I'm getting there. I've ordered a Media Center remote to make life easier when watching video on there. If the worst comes to the worst, I'll probably leave the Media Center in place just to stream and copy media to, rather than record on. Hopefully my aerial upgrade will

Media Center: Teething problems

I took my first steps down the magical green brick road that is Windows XP Media Center Edition last night.

It was all going so well; I'd fitted my DVD drive, and new graphics card, installed Windows, and connected everything up to my television using my new scart to s-video cable. Windows looked surprisingly good. Crap in comparison to a monitor, but much better than the last time I tried TV out. When launched, the Media Center interface looks excellent - perfectly acceptable by my standards and apparently sufficiently attractive to meet the exacting standards imposed by my wife.

But then it all went wrong. Launching Media Center results in a "your card or drivers aren't supported" error. Media Center then runs, but won't play any video. A few frantic minutes of research later, and I find that Media Center requires a card with greater than 32mb of ram. Guess how much the one I bought has? So I located a sneaky registry hack that turns of the memory check, but that doesn't do a lot of good either. Video still doesn't work, it just does it in a slightly less elegant fashion (black screen instead of friendly error message).

I did more research, and discovered that Media Center ideally needs a Direct X 9 compatible graphics card too. So, I've just ordered one. The problem is, I don't know whether it will work or not. My AGP port is a 4x AGP port - the card is 8x AGP. AGP is supposed to be backwards compatible, but voltage issues can cause incompatibilities. Assuming the new card runs at 1.5v, everything will be fine - it would be nice if I could find a voltage indicator somewhere on the internet then, wouldn't it?

Hopefully Amazon will get the card to me asap. Hopefully it will work. Having phoned them at 10:52 on Thursday the 26th of January 2006, and having been told by John that they'll take the card back if it doesn't work (aren't blogs handy, eh?), I have nothing to lose.